If you insist you are right, and someone else is wrong, this stops you looking at their perspective. Why would you waste time looking at something that you already know is wrong? When you know you are right, this prevents you learning anything new, which halts progress.
Yet real progress can be seen as an improvement in your capacity to deal with the world and its vagaries. The secret of success is to enhance your abilities and become wiser.
Increase your Understanding
The real way to enhance your personal power in the world is to increase your understanding, your integrity, and your capacity for compassion.
But when you see someone else's perspective as wrong, then how can you know if it's worthwhile to investigate? You'll only know by investigating, which will increase your understanding. So be openminded and change your life - if in doubt, check it out!
To stop progressing is to start decaying, which starts when learning stops. Since progress - being able to do more with less - is crucial, being right is completely counterproductive. Yet being right is such a common disease...
Consider how it feels when you argue - neither of you feel good. The most you feel is grim satisfaction, but this is not joy. The emotions that accompany being right or wrong highlight the lack of understanding and compassion. They often indicate you've adopted a belief with little or no investigation.
But without thinking critically, without integration, a belief can only be a free standing positionality with no solid foundation. You've delegated your thinking by accepting someone else's thinking, which is about as effective as delegating your exercise!
Since your lack of critical thinking means you cannot defend your stance rationally, you defend it emotionally. But emotional defenses do little to convince, to change your life you need to persuade instead.
When they understand why your stance is more effective than theirs, they are more likely to change their mind. Even if they don't immediately, they may do so later.
Write it down!
These concepts in this Change my Life series will increase your personal power and improve your life. Yet it's not enough just to know about them, you need to be able to use them. They become second nature when integrated into your being. So give them some energy. (See how on the /write page on the website.)
Avoid thinking you know it all, don't get stuck in the misleading dichotomy of right or wrong. Authentically knowing these concepts gives you extra power, so be humble enough to learn, and hungry for the benefits learning brings. Just do it!
To change how you feel internally, it works to invest time and energy in changing what you think, in changing any outdated beliefs.
Life will bring you plenty of opportunity to practice. Be aware that you'll often be tempted to call someone wrong. Your self sabotage mechanism may try and sabotage the progress you're making here. You may even be tempted to judge these Change my Life articles as wrong.
Peace and joy result from knowing the truth, accepting what is, and understanding how things work. This requires internal change, which many people resist. Yet unless you change, how will you ever experience more peace, love, calm and joy in your life?
© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!
Food for Thought
"A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes."
- Hugh Downs
Cris Baker has much practice in overcoming adversity, he's been screwing things up for years! Why suffer the consequences of your own mistakes? Now you can benefit from real knowledge, crucial know-how gained from his vast experience with extensive pain and suffering!